Autumn 2003: Editor Privately Admits New York Times Was Not Critical of Chalabi Because It Heavily Relied on Him as Source

Michael Massing, the author of a probing New York Review of Books article on the poor quality of US reporting on Iraq prior to the Iraq war, will say that in the autumn of 2003, “I ran into a senior editor at the [New York] Times and asked him” why journalists were so uncritical about information from defectors like Ahmed Chalabi. “Well, he said, some reporters at the paper had relied heavily on Chalabi as a source and so were not going to write too critically about him.” Massing comments, “The editor did not name names, but he did not have to,” and notes that New York Times reporter Judith Miller has been heavily criticized for publishing stories based on information from defectors that later proved completely false. [New York Review of Books, 2/26/2004]